14

The Doctrine of the Castes

The caste system is one of the main expressions of the traditional sociopolitical order, a “form” victorious over chaos and the embodiment of the metaphysical ideas of stability and justice. The division of individuals into castes or into equivalent groups according to their nature and to the different rank of activities they exercise with regard to pure spirituality is found with the same traits in all higher forms of traditional civilizations, and it constitutes the essence of the primordial legislation and of the social order according to “justice.” Conformity to one’s caste was considered by traditional humanity as the first and main duty of an individual.

The most complete type of caste hierarchy, the ancient Indo-Aryan system, was visibly inspired by the hierarchy of the various functions found in a physical organism animated by the spirit. At the lower level of such an organism there are the undifferentiated and impersonal energies of matter and of mere vitality; the regulating action of the functions of the metabolism and of the organism is exercised upon these forces. These functions, in turn, are regulated by the will, which moves and directs the body as an organic whole in space and time. Finally, we assume the soul to be the center, the sovereign power and the “light” of the entire organism. The same is true for the castes; the activities of the slaves or workers (śūdras) were subordinated to the activities of the bourgeoisie (vaiśya); higher up in the hierarchy we find the warrior nobility (kṣatriya); and finally the representatives of the spiritual authority and power (the brāhmaṇa, in the original sense of the word, and the leaders as pontifices). These groups were arranged in a hierarchy that corresponded to the hierarchy of the functions within a living organism.

Such was the Indo-Aryan sociopolitical system, which closely resembled the Persian system; the latter was articulated into the four pishtra of the Lords of fire (athreva), of the warriors (rathaestha), of the heads of the family (vastriya-fshuyant), and of the serfs assigned to manual labor (huti). An analogous pattern was found in other civilizations up to the European Middle Ages, which followed the division of people into servants, burghers, nobility and clergy. In the Platonic worldview, the castes corresponded to different powers of the soul and to particular virtues: the rulers (ἄρχοντες), the warriors (ϕύλακες or έπικονρί) and the workers (demiurgoi) corresponded respectively to the spirit (νο ς) and to the head, to the animus (θνμοιδές) and to the chest, and to the faculty of desire (έπιθνμητικόν) and to the lower organs of the body regulating sex and the functions of excretion. In this way, as stated by Plato, the external order and hierarchy correspond to an inner order and hierarchy according to “justice.”^[1] The idea of organic correspondence is also found in the well-known Vedic simile of the generation of the various castes from the distinct parts of the “primordial man” or puruṣa.^[2]

The castes, more than defining social groups, defined functions and typical ways of being and acting. The correspondence of the fundamental natural possibilities of the single individual to any of these functions determined his or her belonging to the corresponding caste. Thus, in the duties toward one’s caste (each caste was traditionally required to perform specific duties), the individual was able to recognize the normal explication as well as the development and the chrism of his or her own nature^[3] within the overall order imposed “from above.” This is why the caste system developed and was applied in the traditional world as a natural, agreeable institution based on something that everybody regarded as obvious, rather than on violence, oppression, or on what in modern terms is referred to as “social injustice.” By acknowledging his own nature, traditional man knew his own place, function, and what would be the correct relationship with both superiors and inferiors; hence, if a vaiśya did not acknowledge the authority of a kṣatriya, or if a kṣatriya did not uphold his superiority in regards to a vaiśya or a śūdra, this was not so much considered a fault but as the result of ignorance. A hierarchy was not a device of the human will but a law of nature and as impersonal a physical law as that according to which a lighter fluid floats on top of a denser fluid, unless an upsetting factor intervenes. There was a firmly upheld principle according to which “Those who want to institute a process at variance with human nature cannot make it function as an ethical system.”^[4]

What upsets modern sensitivity the most about the caste system is the law of heredity and preclusion. It seems “unfair” that fate may seal at birth one’s social status and predetermine the type of activity to which a man will consecrate the rest of his life and which he will not be able to abandon, not even in order to pursue an inferior one, lest he become an “outcast,” a pariah shunned by everybody.

When seen against the background of the traditional view of life, however, these difficulties are overcome. The closed caste system was based on two fundamental principles: the first principle consisted of the fact that traditional man considered everything visible and worldly as the mere effects of causes of a higher order. Thus, for example, to be born according to this or that condition, as a man or a woman, in one caste rather than in another, in one race instead of another, and to be endowed with specific talents and dispositions, was not regarded as pure chance. All of these circumstances were explained by traditional man as corresponding to the nature of the principle embodied in an empirical self, whether willed or already present transcendentally in the act of undertaking human birth. Such is one of the aspects of the Hindu doctrine of karma; although this doctrine does not correspond to what is commonly meant by “reincarnation,”^[5] it still implies the generic idea of the preexistence of causes and the principle that “human beings are heirs of karma.” Similar doctrines were not typical of the East alone. According to a Hellenistic teaching, not only “the soul’s quality exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have,” but “the body has been organized and determined by the image of the soul which is in it.”^[6] Also, according to some Persian-Aryan views that eventually found their way to Greece and then to ancient Rome, the doctrine of sacred regality was connected to the view that souls are attracted by certain affinities to a given planet corresponding to the predominant qualities and to the rank of human birth; the king was considered domus natus precisely because he was believed to have followed the path of solar influences.^[7] Those who love “philosophical” explanations should remember that Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s theory concerning the “intelligible character” (the “noumenal” character that precedes the phenomenal world) relates to a similar order of ideas.

And so, given these premises and excluding the idea that birth is a casual event, the doctrine of the castes appears under a very different light. It can be said therefore that birth does not determine nature, but that nature determines birth; more specifically, a person is endowed with a certain spirit by virtue of being born in a given caste, but at the same time, one is born in a specific caste because one possesses, transcendentally, a given spirit. Hence, the differences between the castes, far from being artificial, unfair, and arbitrary, were just the reflection and the confirmation of a preexisting, deeper, and more intimate inequality; they represented a higher application of the principle suum cuique.

In the context of a living tradition, the castes represented the natural “place” of the earthly convergence of analogous wills and vocations; also, the regular and closed hereditary transmission forged a homogeneous group sharing favorable organic; vitalistic, and even psychic proclivities in view of the regular development on the part of single individuals of the aforesaid prenatal determinations or dispositions on the plane of human existence. The individual did not “receive” from the caste his own nature; rather, the caste afforded him the opportunity to recognize or remember his own nature and prenatal will, while at the same time presenting him with a kind of occult heritage related to the blood so that he would be able to realize the latter in a harmonious way. The characteristics, the functions, and the duties of the caste constituted the traces for the regular development of one’s possibilities in the context of an organic social system. In the higher castes, initiation completed this process by awakening and inducing in the single individual certain influences that were already oriented in a supernatural direction.^[8] The ius of the single individual, namely, those prerogatives and distinct rights inherent to each of these traditional articulations, not only allowed this transcendental will to be in harmony with a congenial human heredity, but also allowed everybody to find in the social organism a condition that really corresponded to their own nature and to their deepest attitudes; such a condition was protected against any confusion and prevarication.

When the sense of personality is not focused on the ephemeral principle of human individuality, which is destined to leave behind nothing but a “shadow” at death, all this seems very natural and evident. It is true that much can be “achieved” in a lifetime, but “achievements” mean absolutely nothing from a higher point of view (from a point of view that knows that the progressive decay of the organism will eventually push one into nothingness) when they do not actualize the preexisting will that is the reason for a specific birth; such a prenatal will cannot be easily altered by a temporary and arbitrary decision taken at a given point of one’s earthly journey. Once this is understood, the necessity of the castes will become clear. The only “self” modern man knows and is willing to acknowledge is the empirical self that begins at birth and is more or less extinguished at death. Everything is reduced by him to the mere human individual since in him all prior recollections have disappeared. Thus we witness the disappearance of both the possibility of establishing contact with those forces of which a given birth is just the effect, and the possibility of rejoining that nonhuman element in man, which being situated before birth, is also beyond death; this element constitutes the “place” for everything that may eventually be realized beyond death itself and is the principle of an incomparable sense of security. Once the rhythm has been broken, the contacts lost, and the great distances precluded to the human eye, all the paths seem open and every field is saturated with disorderly, inorganic activities that lack a deep foundation and meaning and are dominated by temporal and particularistic motivations and by passions, cheap interests, and vanity. In this context, “culture” is no longer the context in which it is possible to actualize one’s being through serious commitment and faithfulness; it is rather the locus for “self-actualization.” And since the shifting sands of that nothingness without a name and tradition that is the empirical human subject have become the foundation of that self-actualization, the claim to equality and the right to be, as a matter of principle, anything one chooses to be is therefore carried forward and strenuously advocated in modern society. No other difference is acknowledged to be more right and truer than that which is “achieved” through one’s efforts and “merit” according to the terms of various vain, intellectual, moral, or social beliefs typical of these recent times. In the same way, it is only natural that the only things left are the limits of the most coarse physical heredity, which have become the signs of incomprehensible meanings and which are endured or enjoyed according to each case, as a caprice of fate. It is also natural that personality and blood traits, social vocation and function are all elements that have become increasingly discordant to the point of generating states of real, tragic, inner and outer conflict; from a legal and ethical perspective, they have also led to a qualitative destruction, to a relative leveling, to equal rights and duties, and to an equal social morality that pretends to be imposed on everyone and to be valid for all people in the same way, with total disregard for single natures and for different inner dignities. The “overcoming” of the castes and of the traditional sociopolitical orders has no other meaning. The individual has achieved all his “freedom”; his “chain” is not short, and his intoxication and his illusions as a restless puppet have no limits.

The freedom enjoyed by the man of Tradition was something very different. It did not consist in discarding but in being able to rejoin the deeper vein of his will, which was related to the mystery of his own existential “form.” In reality, that which corresponds to birth and to the physical element of a being reflects what can be called, in a mathematical sense, the resultant [the vectorial sum] of the various forces or tendencies at work in his birth; in other words, it reflects the direction of the stronger force. In this force there may be inclinations of minor intensity that have been swept away and that correspond to talents and tendencies that on the plane of individual consciousness are distinct from both their own organic preformation and the duties and environment of one’s caste. These instances of inner contradiction within a traditional political order regulated by the caste system must be considered an exception to the rule; they become predominant, though, in a society that no longer knows the castes and, in general, in distinct social organisms in which there is no law to gather, preserve, and shape talents and qualifications in view of specific functions. Here we encounter a chaos of existential and psychic possibilities that condemns most people to a state of disharmony and social tension; we can see plenty of that nowadays. Undoubtedly, there may have been a margin of indetermination even in the case of traditional man, but this margin in him only served to emphasize the positive aspect of these two sayings: “Know yourself” (complemented by the saying “nothing superfluous”), and “Be yourself,” which implied an action of inner transformation and organization leading to the elimination of this margin of indetermination and to the integration of the self. To discover the “dominating” trait of one’s form and caste and to will it, by transforming it into an ethical imperative^[9] and, moreover, to actualize it “ritually” through faithfulness in order to destroy everything that ties one to the earth (instincts, hedonistic motivations, material considerations, and so on)—such is the complement of the abovementioned view that leads to the second foundation of the caste system in its closeness and stability.

On the other hand, we must keep in mind that aspect of the traditional spirit according to which there was no object or function that in itself could be considered as superior or inferior to another. The true difference was rather given by the way in which the object or the function was lived out. The earthly way, inspired by utilitarianism or by greed (sakāma-karma), was contrasted with the heavenly way of the one who acts without concern for the consequences and for the sake of the action itself (niṣkāma-karma), and who transforms every action into a rite and into an “offering.” Such was the path of bhakti, a term that in this context corresponds more to the virile sense of medieval fides than to the pietistic sense that has prevailed in the theistic idea of “devotion.” An action performed according to this type of bhakti was compared to a fire that generates light and in which the matter of the act itself is consumed and purified. The degree to which the act was freed from matter, detached from greed and passion, and made self-sufficient (a “pure act,” to employ analogically an Aristotelian expression) defined the hierarchy of activities and consequently the hierarchy of the castes or other bodies that corresponded to them as “functional classes.”

Given these premises, which were not theoretical but experiential and thus at times not even openly expressed, the aspiration to go from one kind of activity to another (and therefore from one caste to another), which from a superficial and utilitarian perspective may be considered by some as a worthier and more advantageous step, was hardly considered in the traditional world, so much so that the heredity of functions was spontaneously established even where there were no castes, but only social groups. Every type of function and activity appeared equally as a point of departure for an elevation in a different and vertical rather than horizontal sense; and not in the temporal, but in the spiritual order. In this regard, by being in their own caste, in faithfulness to their own caste and to their own nature, in obedience not to a general morality but to their morality, or to the morality of their own caste, everyone enjoyed the same dignity and the same purity as everybody else; this was true for a śūdra as well as for a king. Everybody performed their function within the overall social order, and through their own peculiar bhakti even partook of the supernatural principle of this same order. Thus it was said: “A man attains perfection when his work is worship of God, from whom all things come and who is in all.”^[10] The god Kṛṣṇa declared: “In any way that men love me in the same way they find my love: for many are the paths of men, but they all in the end come to me.”^[11] And also: “In liberty from the bonds of attachment, do thou therefore the work to be done: for the man whose work is pure attains indeed the Supreme.”^[12] The notion of dharma, or one’s peculiar nature to which one is supposed to be faithful,^[13] comes from the root dṛ (“to sustain,” “to uphold”) and it expresses the element of order, form, or cosmos that Tradition embodies and implements over and against chaos and becoming. Through dharma the traditional world, just like every living thing and every being, is upheld; the dams holding back the sea of pure contingency and temporality stand firm; living beings partake of stability. It is therefore clear why leaving one’s caste and mixing castes or even the rights, the duties, the morality, and the cults of each caste was considered a sacrilege that destroys the efficacy of every rite and leads those who are guilty of it to “hell,”^[14] that is, to the realm of demonic influences that belong to the inferior nature. The people guilty of crossing the “caste line” were considered the only “impure” beings in the entire hierarchy; they were pariahs, or “untouchables” because they represented centers of psychic infection in the sense of an inner dissolution. In India only the people “without a caste” were considered outcasts, and they were shunned even by the lowest caste, even if they had previously belonged to the highest caste; on the contrary, nobody felt humiliated by his own caste and even a śūdra was as proud of and as committed to his own caste as a brāhmaṇa of the highest station was to his. Generally speaking, the idea of contamination did not concern only the individual of a higher caste who mixed with a member of a lower caste; even the latter felt contaminated by such mixture.^[15] When gold and lead are mixed together, they are both altered; they both lose their own nature. Therefore it was necessary for everybody to be themselves. Thus, mixing subverted the traditional order and opened the door to infernal forces by removing what Goethe called the “creative limitation.” The goal was the transfiguration of the “form,” which was obtained through bhakti and niṣkāma-karma, namely, through action as rite and as oblation; the alteration, the destruction of the “form,” no matter the way it was carried out, was considered as a degrading form of escapism. The outcast was just the vanquished—in the Aryan East he was called a fallen one, patitas.

This was the second principle on which the caste system was founded; it was a thoroughly spiritual foundation, since India, which implemented this system in one of its strictest versions (even to the point of becoming sclerotic), never had a centralized organization that could impose it by means of a political or economic despotism. Moreover, it is possible to find expressions of this second foundation even in the Western forms of Tradition. It was a classical idea, for instance, that perfection cannot be measured with a material criterion, but that it rather consists in realizing one’s nature in a thorough way. The ancients also believed that materiality only represents the inability to actualize one’s form, since matter (ὕλη) was depicted in Plato and Aristotle’s writings as the foundation of undifferentiation and of an evasive instability that causes a thing or being to be incomplete in itself and not to correspond to its norm and “idea,” (that is, to its dharma). In the Roman deification of the “limit” (termen or terminus) implemented through the elevation of the god Terminus to the highest dignity (he was even associated with the Olympian god Jupiter) as a principle of order and also as the patron saint of the “limits”; in the tradition (susceptible of being interpreted in terms of higher meanings) according to which he who knocked down or removed a single one of the territorial boundary stones was an accursed being to be killed on sight by anybody; and in the Roman oracle that announced that the era of the destruction of the limits erected against human greed will also be the saeculum of the “end of the world”^[16]—in all these elements we find the esoteric reverberation of the same spirit. Plotinus wrote: “Each several thing must be a separate thing; there must be acts and thoughts that are our own; the good and evil done by each human being must be his own.”^[17] The idea that to comply perfectly with one’s own specific function leads to an identical participation in the spirituality of the whole, conceived as a living organism, can be traced back to the best Greco-Roman traditions; later on it eventually became part of the organic vision of the Germanic-Roman civilization of the Middle Ages.

The presuppositions for the sense of joy and pride in one’s own profession (such that any job, no matter how humble it was, could be performed as an “art), which have been preserved in some European peoples until recent times as an echo of the traditional spirit, are not any different, after all. The ancient German peasant, for instance, experienced his cultivating the land as a title of nobility, even though he was not able to see in this work, unlike his Persian counterpart, a symbol and an episode of the struggle between the god of light and the god of darkness. The members of the medieval corporations and guilds were as proud of their professional tradition as the nobility was proud of its bloodline. And when Luther, following Saint Thomas, taught that to go from one profession to another in order to enhance one’s position in the social hierarchy ran contrary to God’s law because God assigns to each and every one his or her own state, and therefore people must obey Him by remaining where they are and that the only way to serve God consists in doing one’s best at one’s job, the tradition was faithfully preserved in these ideas, and the best spirit of the Middle Ages was reflected, although with the limitations inherent in a theistic and devotional schema.

Prior to the advent of the civilization of the Third Estate (mercantilism, capitalism), the social ethics that was religiously sanctioned in the West consisted in realizing one’s being and in achieving one’s own perfection within the fixed parameters that one’s individual nature and the group to which one belonged clearly defined. Economic activity, work, and profit were justified only in the measure in which they were necessary for sustenance and to ensure the dignity of an existence conformed to one’s own estate, without the lower instinct of self-interest or profit coming first. Hence, we encounter a character of active impersonality in this domain as well.

It has been noted that in the caste hierarchy, relationships like those occurring between potentiality and act were reenacted. In the superior caste, the same activity that in the inferior caste presented itself in a more conditioned form was manifested in a more pure, complete, and freer manner as an idea. This allows us to take issue with the modern demagogical ideas concerning an alleged “flocklike mindedness” of individuals who lived in traditional societies, and concerning the alleged lack of that sense of dignity and freedom of every individual that only modern, “evolved” mankind is supposed to have achieved. In fact, even when the hierarchical position of the individual did not proceed from the spontaneous acknowledgment of one’s own nature and one’s faithfulness to it, the subordination of the inferior to the superior, far from being an indolent acquiescence, was almost the symbolical and ritual expression of a faithfulness and a devotion to one’s particular ideal and to a higher form of being that the inferior could not directly and organically live out as his own nature (svadharma), but which he could still consider as the center of his own actions precisely through his devotion and active subordination to a higher caste.^[18] Moreover, although in the East to leave one’s caste was only allowed in exceptional cases and a fugitive was far from being considered a free man, it was still possible to create certain causes through the way one conducted oneself in thought, word, and deed. These causes, by virtue of the analogy with the principle or with the hierarchy to which one was subjected, could produce a new way of being that corresponded to that principle or to that hierarchy.^[19] Besides the bhakti or fides that is aimed directly at the Supreme Principle, that is, at the Unconditioned, the bhakti that was centered on some other high principle was thought to have the real and objective power to resolve the elements of the one who had nourished it (following the fulfillment of his own dharma) into this same principle,^[20] and thus to make that person ascend, not exteriorly and artificially (as is the case in the disorder and careerism of modern society), but from within, in a profound and organic way, from a lower to a higher degree of the spiritual hierarchy as a reflection of the passage of the transcendental principle of being from one possibility to another.

Regarding that kind of social order that had its center in a sovereign and lasted up to the time of the Holy Roman Empire, there survives the principle (upheld by Celsus against the dualism of early Christianity) according to which the subjects may demonstrate their faithfulness to God through faithfulness to their ruler. The view of the subject as a being connected to the person of his sovereign through a sacred and freely chosen vow is an ancient Indo-European view. In the traditional world, this fides or personal devotion went beyond political and individual boundaries, and even acquired the value of a path leading to liberation. Cumont, in reference to Iran, observed that

The subjects dedicated to their deified kings not only their actions and. words, but their very thoughts. Their duty was a complete abandonment of their personality in favor of those monarchs who were held the equal of gods. The sacred militia of the mysteries was nothing but this civic morality viewed from the religious standpoint. It confounded loyalty with piety.^[21]

This loyalty, in the brightest and most luminous forms of Tradition, was credited with the power of producing the same fruits faith is supposed to produce. Not too many years ago, the Japanese general Nogi, who had prevailed at Port Arthur against his Russian foes, killed himself with his wife after the death of his emperor in order to follow him in the afterlife.

All of this is self-evident since I have said that faithfulness is the second cornerstone of every traditional organization, in addition to the rite and an elite that embodies transcendence. This is the force that, as a magnet, establishes contacts, creates a psychic atmosphere, stabilizes the social structure, and determines a system of coordination and gravitation between the individual elements and the center. When this fluid, which is rooted in freedom and in the spiritual spontaneity of the personality, fails, the traditional organism loses its elementary power of cohesion, paths become precluded, subtler senses atrophied, the parts dissociated and atomized. The consequence of this degeneration is the immediate withdrawal of the forces from above, which thus abandon men to themselves, leaving them free to go where they wish according to the destiny that their actions create and that no superior influence will ever be able to modify again. This is the mystery inherent in decadence.

Footnotes

1. “Justice is produced in the soul, like health in the body, by establishing the elements concerned in their natural relations of control and subordination; whereas injustice is like disease and means that this natural order is inverted.” Plato, Republic, trans. B. Jowett, 444a, b.

2. Ṛg Veda 10.90.10–12. This fourfold division became a threefold division when nobility was thought to encompass both the warrior and the spiritual dimensions and practiced in those areas in which residues of this original situation existed. This division corresponds to the Nordic division into jarls, karls, and traells and to the Hellenistic division into eupatrids, gheomors, and demiurgs.

3. Bhagavadgītā (18.41): “The works of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Sudras are different in harmony with the three powers of their born nature.” The Bhagavad Gita, trans J. Mascaró (New York, 1962).

4. Chung-yung, 13.1. Plato defined the concept of “justice” along similar lines (Republic, 432d, 434c).

5. The idea that the same personal principle or spiritual nucleus has already lived in previous human lives and that it will continue to do so ought to be rejected. R. Guénon launched a devastating critique of this idea in his L’Erreur spirite (Paris, 1923). I followed suit in my The Doctrine of Awakening. Historically, the belief in reincarnation is related to the weltanschauung typical of the substratum of pre-Aryan races and of the influence exercised by them; from a doctrinal point of view it is a simple, popular myth, and not the expression of an “esoteric” knowledge. In the Vedas the idea of reincarnation is not found at all.

6. Plotinus, Enneads, 3.4.5; 1.1.1. Plato wrote: “No guardian spirit will cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own destiny. Let him to whom the first lot falls choose first a life to which he will be bound of necessity.” Republic, 617e.

7. See Plato’s Phaedrus, 10.15–16, 146–48b; and Emperor Julian’s Hymn to King Helios, 131b. However, the nature of the elements that determine a given birth is as complex as the nature of the elements that constitutes a human being, who is the sum of various legacies. See my Doctrine of Awakening.

8. “Just as good seed, sown in a good field, culminates in a birth, so the son born from an Aryan father in an Aryan mother deserves every transformative ritual… . Seed sown in the wrong field perishes right inside it; and a field by itself with no seed also remains barren.” The Laws of Manu, 10.69.71.

9. The only modern thinker who has come close to this view, yet without being aware of it, was Nietzsche; he developed a view of absolute morality with a “naturalistic” basis.

10. Bhagavadgītā, 18.46.

11. Ibid., 4.11. In 17.3 it is stated that the “devotion” of a man must be conformed to his nature.

12. Ibid., 3.19. See also The Laws of Manu, 2.9: “For the human being who fulfills the duty declared in the revealed canon and in tradition wins renown here on earth and unsurpassable happiness after death.”

13. Bhagavadgītā, 18.47: “Greater is thine own work, even if this be humble, than the work of another, even if this be great. When a man does the work God gives him, no sin can touch this man.”

14. Ibid., 1.42–44. In relation to the duty of remaining faithful to the specific function and to the customs of one’s caste, we may recall the characteristic episode in which Rama killed a serf (ṣūdra) who practiced asceticism, thus usurping a privilege of the priestly caste. Also we may recall the traditional teaching according to which the “Iron Age” or “Dark Age” will be inaugurated when the serfs will practice asceticism; this seems indeed a sign of our times, as some plebeian ideologies have come to see in “labor” a particular kind of asceticism.

15. Within certain limits, the idea of contamination did not apply to women; men of higher castes could marry women of lower castes without being contaminated. Traditionally the woman did not relate to a caste in a direct way but rather through her husband. The Laws of Manu (9.22): “When a woman is joined with a husband in accordance with the rules, she takes on the very same qualities that he has, just like a river flowing down into the ocean.” This is, however, no longer the case when the existential traditional structures lose their vital force.

16. The meaning of this oracle converges with the Hindu teaching according to which the Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which is the end of a cycle (Mahā Yuga), corresponds to a period of unrestrained intermingling of the castes and to the decline of the rites.

17. Enneads, 3.1.4.

18. “If we say that people of this sort ought to be subject to the highest type of man, we intend that the subject should be governed not to his own detriment but on the same principle as his superior, who is himself governed by the divine element within him. It is better for everyone to be subject to a power of godlike wisdom residing within himself, or failing that, imposed from without.” Plato, Republic, 590d.

19. In The Laws of Manu, while on the one hand it is written: “Even if he is set free by his master, a servant is not set free from slavery; for since that is innate in him, who can take it from him?” (8.414); on the other hand we read: “The servant’s duty and supreme good is nothing but obedience to famous priestly householders, who know the Veda. If he is unpolluted, obedient to his superiors, gentle in his speech, without a sense of ‘I,’ and always dependent on the priests and the other twice-born castes, he attains a superior birth in the next life” (9.334–5). And also (10.42): “By the powers of their seed and their asceticism, in age after age these castes are pulled up or pulled down in birth among men here on earth.”

20. We may recall Plotinus’s teaching: “When we cease to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career. That principle (of the new birth) strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit” Enneads, 3.1.3. In this instance, this “guiding spirit” corresponds to the principle that has been made the object of one’s active and loyal bhakti.

21. F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, 20.